Three hours of voting to go, and thoughts turn to what happens next. Counting, obviously. But how? And where? And, as we’d all rather like to know, when?
First results are due between 1.30am and 2am BST on Friday 19 September. Remote Orkney – which has the smallest electorate, with 17,515 registered voters – is expected to be the first to declare. Most of the results should come through between 3am and 5am.
Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen – home to about 25% of registered voters – will be the last three councils to announce results, between 5am and 6am.
The councils will report results to Mary Pitcaithly, the chief counting officer, at the Royal Highland Centre at Ingliston, near Edinburgh. Pitcaithly is expected to announce the final result between 6.30am and 7.30am.
British prime minister David Cameron will make a televised address shortly after the results are declared to try to calm the atmosphere whatever the result.
The independence referendum was not the only historic decision made in Scotland on Thursday, reports Owen Gibson, the Guardian’s chief sports correspondent, with the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews finally voting to accept female members for the first time in its 260-year history:
More than three-quarters of the clubs membership took part in the ballot, with 85% voting in favour of women becoming members in a result announced outside its famous clubhouse on Thursday evening.
The R&A, which is both the historic home of golf and the game’s governing body outside the US and Mexico, belatedly conceded in March this year that after years of mounting pressure the time had come to vote on whether to accept women as members.
It’s 2,400 all-male members have been voting by post and had been urged by club secretary Peter Dawson to “do what’s right for golf”, making the outcome far easier to predict than the other ballot taking place.
They voted “overwhelmingly” to change their outdated rules and the R&A will now approach 15 women already identified as having made a large contribution to the sport to be fast tracked through the application process.
Tiger Woods swings into action on the 15th tee over the Old Course at St Andrews in 2010. Photograph: Brian Stewart/EPA
Three reasons polls might be right – and one why they could still be wrong
Tom Clark is gearing up to provide analysis of the results as they pile in through the night, and he’s flexing his psephology muscles early with some thoughts on the polls we’ve seen so far:
All the final polls have converged neatly around 48% Yes, 52% No. Even if the surveys were perfectly designed, you’d expect more random variation. The suspicious mind wonders whether nervous pollsters have sprinkled a little magic dust, judging it’s better to hang together than hang apart if things go wrong. The world will soon forget if they underestimate the No lead, but not if Yes comes out on top.
There are three decent reasons to think No looks a reasonably safe bet:
1) Safety in numbers: Scores of surveys have now been done using very different methods – online, telephone and face-to-face, with all sorts of different methods – and yet only three at any stage have shown Yes ahead. While any one poll might have a 3-percentage point margin of error, the chances of so many being out in a particular direction are dramatically reduced.
2) The swing back to the status quo: governments often pick up at the 11th hour as voters cling to ‘nurse for fear of something worse’. If voting for independence is the risky option, you’d expect a swing back to No in the privacy of the ballot box.
3) The great theory on the Yes side, that super-high turnout will confound the pollsters, looks optimistic: if interest is high, you’d expect high turnout on both sides, even if one side is more engaged than the other. If it averaged (say) 85% overall, then – if Yes are more motivated – they might get (say) 88% out, compared with (say) 82% among Nos. That sort of differential is only going to swing the overall outcome if the race is extremely tight, within the four point gap that the polls predict.
Governments often pick up at the 11th hour as voters cling to ‘nurse for fear of something worse’. Photograph: Andy Rain /EPA
Against all this, though, there’s one serious factor which could confound all predictions – not sampling error, in the random sense, but systematic bias in the way that surveys work. Online polls rely on internet panels made up of self-selecting members. Pollsters can and do adjust for things they can measure, such as age and sex, but not differences in the personality types who are inclined to answer surveys. Phone polls rely on people picking up (mostly) landline phones, which many people plagued by sales calls these days decline to do. The many people the pollsters miss because of these effects are almost certainly different in some ways. And if one of the ways in which they’re different is being more inclined to back independence, then Yes is still in with a real shot.
The Scottish independent vote could be a crowd-puller for at least one bar in New York City.
The Guardian’s Dominic Rushe – in the course of research – visits the Highlands, “a contemporary Scottish gastropub” in the West Village “inspired by the cuisines of modern Glasgow and Dublin,” boasting an 11-page whisky menu and tartan-clad waiters.
They are putting a TV behind the bar for the first time tonight and are expecting a bigger crowd than usual when doors open at 5:30pm eastern time. ‘Thursday is a busy night for us anyway but tonight might go on longer than usual,’ said Glaswegian Adrian Barry, Highland’s manager. ‘I’m hoping for a yes vote. I think Labour mucked things up in Scotland by shifting too close to the Tories. Scotland is pretty much a socialist country.’
A glimpse at Highlands’ menu reveals that it includes that traditional Scottish dish, watermelon salad with grilled halumi ($16) and whipped ricotta starter ($10). But it does also include a main course of haggis ($21).
And live from the streets of downtown Manhattan, here’s a guy playing the bagpipes.
The Guardian US’s Amanda Michel reports: “This guy is playing away in front of a Duane Reade near the Guardian US office – I tried to ask him his position on today’s vote but he kept playing.” Hats off Amanda for at least trying to get him to stop playing.
The Guardian’s Scotland correspondent, Severin Carrell, alerts me to some revealing research from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, which has concluded that No voters get up earlier than Yes voters. What can it mean?
The team at RGU analysed tweets using the #indyref hashtag from Scots who had cast their votes, and found plenty more Nos in the morning, with the Yesses coming later to the party.
RGU’s Professor Sarah Pedersen said:
We think that this has happened because the Better Together campaign encouraged their supporters to re-tweet the basic statement ‘Today I have voted NO to get faster, better, safer change for Scotland’ right from the start of the day.
A re-tweet is of course much easier and faster to do and we see Better Together supporters embracing this opportunity with gusto. It may also be that these voters were indicating their postal votes.
From mid-afternoon, though, the tweet balance swung towards the Yes vote. RGU’s Dr Simon Burnett said:
This is very much associated with the introduction of an equivalent retweet request - ‘@YesVoteScots: Retweet this if you have voted Yes already!!’ – from the Yes campaign.
Does this mean the Yes voters will be staying up much later tonight? We literally have no idea. Please RT.
The run-up to the referendum witnessed what is arguably* the worst political campaign advert ever: #PatronisingBTlady. OK, officially it’s a Better Together attempt to win over the undecided female voter, and was supposed to be called The Woman Who Made Up Her Mind. You’ll see why the hashtag caught on, though.
(*not arguably. It definitely is the worst.)
If you enjoyed that little number, take a look at Tom Meltzer’s round-up of the campaign’s internet highlights. Several of them are actually rather impressive examples of campaigns harnessing the power of social media to inspire and effect change. And some are just laughably rubbish. Enjoy.
Our most northerly correspondent, Esther Addley, reports from Shetland that, as of 5.30pm BST, 92% of postal votes had been returned. The counting officer predicts an overall turnout of 80% by the time polls close at 10pm. To put that in context, the comparable figure for the May 2014 European elections was 29.6%.
With less than four hours to go, it’s all hands to the campaigning pump here in Scotland. First minister Alex Salmond appears to be simultaneously courting a doorstep voter and applying his most persuasive phone manner. Add a Yes sandwich board and he’d have this canvassing lark nailed.
Think the Yes vote is all about Alex Salmond and pals? Hardly. The grassroots Yes campaign has been one of the most fascinating elements of the campaign, and conventional politics has had very little to do with that.
Here, Tom Clark and Phil Maynard chat with Cat Boyd, of Radical Yes, in Drumchapel earlier today:
Cat Boyd, of Radical Yes, on today’s historic vote.
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